I hope that my confession can help others avoid my schoolboy error so that they can tap into the power of an appreciative mindset.

From Marcus Cicero to Marci Shimoff, countless thought leaders over many millennia have spoken of the power of gratitude. One way of cultivating Cicero’s “parent of all virtues” is a daily gratitude practice. There are a few variations on this theme but the practice essentially boils down to listing a number of things that you are grateful for each day. It is a tried and tested way of developing our “appreciative muscles” – creating new neural pathways and strengthening existing body-mind connections to change our perceptions; so that we see ourselves, others, and our world in a better light. Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of gratitude in terms of increased life expectancy, improved health and many other indicators of an enhanced quality of life.

Some people explain the power of gratitude in terms of the law of attraction – your thoughts acting as magnets for life experiences; while others focus on the role of gratitude in shifting people from an unresourceful to a resourceful mental and physical state. Imagine, for instance, that your boss is unable to attend a meeting and they ask you, at short notice, to deliver a presentation in their place. If you are grateful for the opportunity you will be much more likely to benefit from the meeting than if you are resentful for the extra work load imposed. 

My wife Julie and I began our daily gratitude practice in April 2013 after Julie bought Jackie Kelm’s book, The Joy of Appreciative Living: Your 28-day Plan to Greater Happiness in 3 Incredibly Easy Steps. One of the steps is a daily gratitude practice in which you write down three things you are grateful for each day… Incredibly Easy???

Well... actually not very easy at all in my case. Pretty soon after starting the practice I was feeling considerably worse than I had felt before we had begun, which was obviously NOT the intended outcome!! Either something was wrong with the plan or the way in which I had been implementing it. Initially I was convinced that the plan was at fault but it soon became clear that I hadn't been doing it right.  

When listing my three gratitudes I had been focusing solely on the obviously positive things – the weather is nice, our children are healthy, we have enough to eat, etc., etc. - typical motherhood and apple pie stuff. However, both Julie and I had subconsciously steered clear of the “hidden gifts” that dwell in life’s more challenging situations.

With each passing day I found myself smiling through gritted teeth as my feelings of dissatisfaction bubbled and churned beneath the surface. We were doing all this “appreciative” stuff but we were still massively in debt, my consultancy contracts had dried up and I was not in perfect health... but I felt that I couldn't talk about these subjects because that would be "unappreciative!" This culminated in me quitting the “charade” in a fit of petulance on Day 14 as I tried, and failed, to envisage my joy-filled life!! In one fell swoop I had consigned Appreciative Living to the “nice but not for me” category. 

I have to confess that I had not actually read Jackie’s book at this stage and Julie had only skimmed it, focusing mainly on Part Two “what you need to do” and not on Part One “what you need to know.” 

Following my tantrum, Julie read the book from cover to cover in order to gain a fuller understanding of what Appreciative Living was actually all about. I was a bit reluctant to follow suit but Julie gently persuaded me to give the process a “fair trial.” 

In Part One Jackie explains, among other things, that every moment is replete with infinite possibilities and what we choose to focus on will become our experience – our map of reality. It was clear that gratitude actually means looking for the gifts in ALL situations; NOT drawing a veil over aspects of our lives that we wouldn't wish for in an ideal world - in other words not kidding ourselves. 

Armed with our new understanding, we restarted the practice in May 2013 and looked for the joy in all situations. It was challenging at first, but with training our “appreciative muscles” progressively strengthened. Our daily gratitudes are now a firmly ingrained habit and they have helped to turn our lives around. We are now out of debt, my health is improving and I am being hired for lots of exciting work … much of it using the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, the organisational development paradigm that inspired Appreciative Living!!

The huge difference between gratitude and kidding ourselves was unclear to me back in April 2013 and my so-called “gratitude habit” actually ended up causing me more harm than good. Adopting an ostrich-like attitude to life’s challenges had left me vulnerable to some pretty powerful kicks in the rear end. But shining a light on the silver linings that dwell in every cloud, however small they appear to be at the time, has given me the strength to take action to deal with life's daily challenges as they arise rather than burying my head in the sand.

So while it is great to appreciate things when they are going well, the gratitude practice really comes into its own when it is used to address life's setbacks; because the excrement of life can then be turned into rich compost and used as the most potent of fertilizers for our growth.

Jackie Kelm (2008). The Joy of Appreciative Living: Your 28-Day Plan to Greater Happiness in 3 Incredibly Easy Steps. Tarcher/Penguin.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and its offshoot Appreciative Living are organisational and personal development paradigms that encourage inquiring about, learning from, and building upon what is working in order to facilitate positive change. The core of AI is the notion that what you focus on expands.

Pioneered by David Cooperrider and the late Suresh Srivastva of Case Western Reserve University in the late 1980s, AI has been attracting a growing following and its principles have been successfully applied to a diverse range of organisations including Nutrimental, Hunter Douglas, GTE, Red Cross, British Airways, the United Religions Initiative and the US Navy.  Appreciative Living is a programme that has adapted AI principles to personal development. Pioneered by Jackie Kelm, Appreciative Living now has registered practitioners in twelve countries.

One of the biggest criticism of AI is that it doesn't address the negatives; that it, is a form of problem-avoidance and denial. This notion can be illustrated by the following scenario: a participant returns from an AI meeting full of energy and enthusiasm only to encounter the unchanged negative “realities” of office politics, budget cuts, delays in programme implementation, and so on. The rose tinted specs are yanked off and AI is filed away as “nice but not for the real world”. In such a case either AI has been poorly facilitated or the participant was sleeping during some vital segments of the workshop. Because AI IS designed to address the negatives, but not in a way that negates the positive aspects that exist in every situation. AI cannot afford to ignore negatives because if a burning issue is not attended to it will inevitably come back to bite you!

Jackie Kelm paints the picture of our lives as a movie that constantly plays in front of us on an imaginary screen. This screen has a line going through the middle. On one side of the line are the positive things – talents, dreams, and creative ideas, to name a few. On the other side of the line are the negative things – fears, failures, weaknesses and so on.

So assuming that AI has been “done right”, will it produce a cohort of reality-denying Pollyannas? In Jackie Kelm’s words: 

The opposite is actually true. It may seem ironic, but spending time on the positive side gives you the courage, inspiration, and motivation to deal with the “bad stuff.” 

A well-facilitated AI workshop can help to start you off on this positive path but ultimately it takes persistent, purposeful practice to sustain the change.